If you’ve identified a problem in your organization and want to propose a new course of action, a persuasive memo can help drive change.
A mentor walked me through this convenient template for a logical memo format that can get stuff done. Enjoy!
- Problem
- Work from symptoms to root cause by asking ‘why’
- Why are we talking about this? (could be any of the below or others)
- Size (eg. this is a big issue as it puts xx CM $s at risk)
- Impact (eg. it will impact xx% of the company/ units)
- People (eg it touches xx% of our people/ front line, etc..)
- Process/ Function (would change how / when we do things..)
- Options
- What are the extremes, tease out a few spectrums of possibilities to explore (get outside ur comfort zone.. if this feels easy, stop, go back and try again.. get uncomfortable, that’s where change happens!)
- Have you now aligned on a set of options to explore?
- What are the options along the spectrum? Pros/ Cons/ $Costs/ Rev $ impact of each option
- Recommendation (it may be an option at one of the ends of the spectrums!)
- Why this?
- Why not another?
- Implications to money, people, operations..
- Impact of your recommendation
- Financial, People, Ops, other..
Patrick Weeks 